, parallels, conjugates, correlatives of language have
anything corresponding to them in nature. There are too many words as
well as too few; and they generalize the objects or ideas which they
represent. The greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of
language teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words
our servants, and not allowing them to be our masters.

Plato does not add the further observation, that the etymological
meaning of words is in process of being lost. If at first framed on
a principle of intelligibility, they would gradually cease to be
intelligible, like those of a foreign language, he is willing to admit
that they are subject to many changes, and put on many disguises. He
acknowledges that the 'poor creature' imitation is supplemented by
another 'poor creature,'--convention. But he does not see that 'habit
and repute,' and their relation to other words, are always exercising
an influence over them. Words appear to be isolated, but they are really
the parts of an organism which is always being reproduced. They are
refined by civilization, harmonized by poetry, emphasized by literature,
technically applied in philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on
the border-ground of human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from
individual genius, and come with a new force and association to every
lively-minded person. They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of
millions, and yet are always imperceptibly changing;--not the inventors
of language, but writing and speaking, and particularly great writers,
or works which pass into the hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespear,
Dante, the German or English Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of
them in later ages. They carry with them the faded recollection of their
own past history; the use of a word in a striking and familiar passage
gives a complexion to its use everywhere else, and the new use of an
old and familiar phrase has also a peculiar power over us. But these and
other subtleties of language escaped the observation of Plato. He is not
aware that the languages of the world are organic structures, and that
every word in them is related to every other; nor does he conceive of
language as the joint work of the speaker and the hearer, requiring in
man a faculty not only of expressing his thoughts but of understanding
those of others.

On the other hand, he cannot be justly charged with a desire to frame
language on artificia